


Life’s but a walking shadow

by fannishliss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Gift Fic, Kissing, Season/Series 11, Supernatural Elements, Theology, Valentine's Day, mentions of Lisa because I still love her
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-04
Updated: 2016-02-04
Packaged: 2018-05-18 03:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,857
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5895727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fannishliss/pseuds/fannishliss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there was one thing Dean had always been ready to lay good money on, it was a zero-tolerance policy toward monsters.  If it ate humans, Dean was ready, willing, able and eager to gank it, no matter how pretty it was or how harmless it claimed to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Life’s but a walking shadow

**title: Life’s but a walking shadow**  
fandom: Supernatural  
pairing: Dean Winchester/Amara  
general audiences

Valentine's ficlet for [](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com/profile)[**amberdreams**](http://amberdreams.livejournal.com/).    yay, I really got into this -- thanks for the prompt !!  :D

===  
  
“Do you really think I’m a monster?” she asked. Her voice was so calm and peaceful, her eyes so full of … Dean didn’t know what to call it. In his mother’s eyes it had been love. Dean had seen something like it in Sam’s eyes, in Bobby’s, in Lisa’s. It would have been so much easier if it had been hunger, lust, mere desire, the urge toward conquest.

As always, Dean found himself answering her.    “If you eat people, souls, you’re a monster.”

She laughed, her easy, merry laugh. Dean hated that her laugh made him think of children playing.

“I told you before, Dean.  I don’t ‘eat’ them.  I make them a part of me.”

“Not really seeing the difference,” Dean said, stubborn. “I just ate a triple cheeseburger at Kim’s Meat Shack, and it’s well on its way to being part of me.  Well, some of it anyways.”

Her rich brown eyes crinkled in amusement and she just smiled without answering.  If only she didn’t always look so delighted with Dean.  He didn’t want to be an amusement or a delight.  He was a Hunter, it was who and what he was, and she was a monster, and he ought to kill her in the proper way of things.  At least he’d tried, even if his heart wasn’t in it.

And there was how he knew it: he was well and truly fucked.

If there was one thing Dean had always been ready to lay good money on, it was a zero-tolerance policy toward monsters.  If it ate humans, Dean was ready, willing, able and eager to gank it, no matter how pretty it was or how harmless it claimed to be.  Some hunters, maybe, might be deceived or seduced by the gods and mega-monsters Dean had gone head to head with, but no one could say anything like that about Dean, at least not to his face. Back when Sam was the subject of intense Demonic speculation, a lot of Hunters had learned the hard way not to question Dean’s work ethic.  His friendship with Castiel was likewise off-limits; and his working relationship with Crowley was something few dared to whisper, fearing retribution not only from Dean but from the King of Hell himself.

Dean didn’t really see the appeal in Big Bads. Sure, they were powerful, but they were mostly just so arrogant it was disgusting.   Lucifer, Eve, Lilith, Michael — he’d gone up against the biggest of bads and hated them all to the very depths of his soul — not to mention the demons who had personally tormented him — Azazel, Ruby, Meg (mostly), Abaddon, and of course Alistair.  Dean loathed them all.  Crowley, Dean regarded as somewhat weaker than the others — a Middle-sized Bad — and often times he was useful.  Dean hated him, of course — but not with the murderous hatred he was used to feeling toward all demons.  Hell, Crowley himself had ganked Meg for siding with Cas, and Dean hated him for that alone — for putting that look in Cas’s eyes, the grief of losing yet another someone the Angel called a friend.

But the Darkness — Amara — wasn’t a demon.  She could suck the soul right out of a body.  She could survive the combined wrath of all God’s (surviving) Angels.  She could go head to head with Lucifer, or with God Himself.  Dean had ganked Death, and he’d even put down Cain, the First Killer, but his blade had shattered on impact against Amara.

All this felt to Dean like it was tattooed on his heart.  Maybe it was, just like the Enochian Cas had carved into his ribs.   Amara had to see it when she looked at him.  But she just kept looking. And when she kissed him, she didn’t even tug at his soul.  She just kissed him, pressing up warm and soft against him, making love to him with her lips, savoring every fractioned moment to the utmost in the way only a being born outside infinity can.  Her kisses silenced Dean, turning off his brain in a way he could usually only find in the most desperate seconds of battle, when the Hunt reached its climax and Dean must kill or be killed.  He felt almost stunned, but intensely alive, and the tremulous ripples of her joy in him tickled, right at the edge of his perception.

“Of course I love you, Dean,” she said.  “You set me free.”

Dean felt a weird pang of jealousy.  “So, I’m nothing special.”

Amara widened her eyes in shock, and laughed again — not at him, Dean knew, but at the very thought.  “Dean — you bore the Mark of Cain, and mastered it, and broke it.  You resisted the combined wrath of all four archangels.  You averted more than one apocalypse.  You’ve overturned God’s plan time after time.  You are the very definition of special.”

“Assigned to the short bus again,” Dean retorted, just to be contrary.

Amara let out a huff. “This is the kind of thing that bothers me most about my brother.  He goes to all the trouble of dividing me from the ‘Light’ and then he creates ‘life’ that can’t exist without light — so that life has to spend its existence struggling endlessly against entropy.  I am the primeval order of things.  Life must suffer and fight tooth and nail and all for what? Only to fall back into me in the end, spent, withered and exhausted.  I have never been so cruel as to suggest that there is a ‘purpose’ to all of this, this ‘petty pace creeping from day to day, full of sound and fury,  
Signifying nothing.’”

The little frown between her brows tugged at Dean’s sympathy against his wishes.  “So everything God made is futile?” Dean suggested, mockingly.

“Yes,” Amara said, sadly.  “He’s an idiot, just telling himself stories that mean nothing. Light isn’t anything but motion with no particular place to go; it will always only dissipate into a state of eternal rest.  Why put it through all that heartbreak? What’s the point?”

Dean had never been able to answer that to anyone else’s satisfaction; he’d given up trying.  The answer to every “why” in Dean’s heart was “Sam” and had always been “Sam” and would always be “Sam” — but Dean guessed he could see why that answer didn’t mean much to anybody else.

Amara’s eyes got even sadder.  “Even his light will fade, in the end,” she said.

Dean felt his anger stir, even though he knew she was right. “Don’t you touch him,” he threatened, deadly serious.

“Or you’ll what,” she purred.

“I’ll never look at you again,” Dean said.  “I know I can’t kill you.  But that doesn’t mean I have to talk to you.”

“Dean,” she consoled, and it didn’t sound as ironic and false and downright mean as the way most monsters said his name.  She sounded concerned.  “I can’t help what I am.  I am the end of all things.  All things come to me in the end; you and your brother will too.  At least — you won’t be alone without him.”

Dean’s heart gave a hurt lurch and went back to beating.  Subsumed into the Darkness alongside Sam; it did sound peaceful; and that realization made him feel even worse.

Amara suddenly brightened.  “Enough of that anyway.  I came to ask a question. Why do you keep dreaming about piercing my heart with an arrow? That’s not going to work, you know.”

Dean frowned, “Piercing your heart…?”

“You’ve dreamt of it two nights in a row. But the second time, you pulled the heart open, and it was full of chocolates.”

“Oh!” Dean exclaimed, then blushed bright red.  “It’s um, it’s Valentine’s Day. It’s next week.  You get, I mean, women, they like, you get gifts, like chocolate and flowers and chick flicks and fancy dinners and sometimes jewelry.”

Dean suddenly remembered sitting on the couch with Lisa, watching Banderas and Hayek in Desperado, sharing an enormous sundae covered in hot fudge with a gooey homemade brownie at the bottom.  Dean hadn’t gotten Lisa anything, still too deep in his own misery to drag her down with him.

“I’m sorry,” Amara said.  “You loved her.”

Dean looked up and found that his eyes were swimming in tears.   “Nah,” he choked, but his throat closed off the denial.

“You did,” Amara said.  “I was there, when she took you in and let you rest.  They all thought you were just using her, but that was never true.  She was the most amazing woman you ever knew.”

“She was,” Dean agreed.

“And you told the Angel to burn you out of her brain,” Amara said, frowning deeply.

“Better off that way,” Dean asserted and tried to deny the fat tears chasing each other down his cheeks.

“I’ll let you rest, Dean,” Amara promised.  “I am the oldest, deepest, darkest den, older than God’s universe.  You don’t have to worry what you might bring down on my head.  I’m not human.  I’m eternal.  I’m literally bigger than all that.”

Dean lifted his eyes and really looked at her.  As always, he got the impression that her eyes were full of stars.  They weren’t.  They looked like a human woman’s eyes.  But she wasn’t human, and Dean knew that Amara was made, not of stars, but of everything else in the universe, all the space and all the dust, and all the dark matter no one could find or understand.  She was standing right there, holding out her arms, loving Dean with her eyes, welcoming him.

Helplessly, he stepped forward and her arms closed around him.

“Don’t worry,” she whispered, rocking him a little.  “However all this turns out.  I’m the end.  I’ll be waiting.”

Dean’s breath caught in a little sob, and released in a deeper exhale.

He didn’t say he was glad.  But in his heart, he could no longer think of the Darkness as a monster.  She was the ultimate rule of existence  — in the end, everything would bow to her.

Til then, she would look at Dean with those peaceful, loving eyes, and leave his soul throbbing in his body when she pressed against him, caressing his lips, and every second he was away from her he would be wondering how long now, until the end.

====

carry on my wayward son  
there’ll be peace when you are done  
lay your weary head to rest  
don’t you cry no more

 

+++

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,  
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,  
To the last syllable of recorded time;  
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools  
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!  
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,  
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,  
And then is heard no more. It is a tale  
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,  
Signifying nothing.  
  
~~~  
There's still time before Feb 14 to request a ficlet! :D


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